Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Worth the trouble

A lot of people wonder why anyone would be friends with a sociopath, or flat out assume that no one would want to be friends with a sociopath. The funny consequence to this mentality is that people assume that I must have no friends. The truth is that there are a lot of people who appreciate having me for a friend. I am not the type of person that they will come to if they just want a shoulder to cry on, but I am a great person to consult if there is a problem they want solved. I'm very good at coming up with workable strategies to help them accomplish whatever it is that they want. And I think a lot of my friends just appreciate my unique perspective, and even my amorality. I don't judge them, so they can be honest with me in a way that they can't really with most other people. People tell me a lot of secrets for that reason.

It's not even always the obviously positive or pro-social aspects of my personality that people are attracted to. I think sometimes they like the sort of negative or dangerous aspects of my personality -- the risk or excitement I bring to their life. Some of them are masochistic and like the pain. Some even like the ruining, perhaps because they want parts of them broken -- like breaking a jaw to reset it in better alignment. And I can see why too, so much of our personality is an accident of the way we were raised or the culture we were born into. Maybe we don't necessarily like those parts of ourselves and need a little help getting over them. You could see a therapist, or you could just enlist the help of your friendly neighborhood sociopath. That's why I found this recent email from a reader to be so interesting:

In high school I had a friend who was almost certainly a sociopath. He took pleasure in ruining people. I let him ruin me to a point. He tried to warn me in various ways. I paid no heed. But why not? I had something to gain by being 'ruined.' I was a painfully uptight young man. There were things I just wouldn't do. Under his influence, I did many of them and to my surprise, survived. He helped me with my scruples. (In Catholicism, 'scruples' refers to "An unfounded apprehension and consequently unwarranted fear that something is a sin which, as a matter of fact, is not.")  I'm much more relaxed now, though still basically uptight.

I'm drawn to sociopaths. They have something I need. The smart ones, the ones who don't end up in jail, have a delicate moral sense. They know where the lines are. They find my scruples amusing, as if to say "Oh you poor thing, that thing your afraid to do isn't a sin in anyone's book. Someone should let you out of your little cage."

I've often wondered why he tried to warn me. Wouldn't a totally evil person keep his bad intentions to himself? Yes. So again, why the warnings? Mainly, he wanted to be understood. Everyone needs to be understood. In my opinion, the effort to understand a sociopath, though fraught, is worth the trouble many times over.

When I read that, I thought maybe the sociopath respected his friend enough to get a sort of informed consent? Or found the friendship worth enough that he didn't want to necessarily lose the friend by making him a target, so wanted to make sure that the friend was at least aware of what was going to happen? What do people think?

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

The downside of empathy

The author of the "Moral Life of Babies," Paul Bloom, writes for the New Yorker, "The Baby in the Well: The Case Against Empathy." He first talks briefly about the origins of the word empathy and the science behind it. He then lists several recent books about how great empathy is and how lack of empathy is essentially responsible for the world's evil, concluding

This enthusiasm may be misplaced, however. Empathy has some unfortunate features—it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We’re often at our best when we’re smart enough not to rely on it.

Why? First, it causes us to over-focus on problems with names and faces and ignore problems that are represented only by faceless statistics:

The key to engaging empathy is what has been called “the identifiable victim effect.” As the economist Thomas Schelling, writing forty-five years ago, mordantly observed, “Let a six-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths—not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.”

Because it is such a powerful emotion, it can be abused by bad people seeking to prey on your empathy:

[A]s critics like Linda Polman have pointed out, the empathetic reflex can lead us astray. When the perpetrators of violence profit from aid—as in the “taxes” that warlords often demand from international relief agencies—they are actually given an incentive to commit further atrocities. It is similar to the practice of some parents in India who mutilate their children at birth in order to make them more effective beggars. The children’s debilities tug at our hearts, but a more dispassionate analysis of the situation is necessary if we are going to do anything meaningful to prevent them.

And it is impossible to empathize with absolutely everyone, because it turns out that even if we loved each other as much as ourselves, we still live in a world of scarce resources and conflicting preferences where trade-offs and compromises must be made, and empathy doesn't really help us there either:

A “politics of empathy” doesn’t provide much clarity in the public sphere, either. Typically, political disputes involve a disagreement over whom we should empathize with. Liberals argue for gun control, for example, by focussing on the victims of gun violence; conservatives point to the unarmed victims of crime, defenseless against the savagery of others. Liberals in favor of tightening federally enforced safety regulations invoke the employee struggling with work-related injuries; their conservative counterparts talk about the small businessman bankrupted by onerous requirements. So don’t suppose that if your ideological opponents could only ramp up their empathy they would think just like you.

One of my favorite paragraphs discusses how empathy wrongly and selfishly focuses people on retributive justice, largely because people want their feelings of outrage satiated by bloodthirsty justice:

On many issues, empathy can pull us in the wrong direction. The outrage that comes from adopting the perspective of a victim can drive an appetite for retribution. (Think of those statutes named for dead children: Megan’s Law, Jessica’s Law, Caylee’s Law.) But the appetite for retribution is typically indifferent to long-term consequences. In one study, conducted by Jonathan Baron and Ilana Ritov, people were asked how best to punish a company for producing a vaccine that caused the death of a child. Some were told that a higher fine would make the company work harder to manufacture a safer product; others were told that a higher fine would discourage the company from making the vaccine, and since there were no acceptable alternatives on the market the punishment would lead to more deaths. Most people didn’t care; they wanted the company fined heavily, whatever the consequence.

Although Bloom also argues that empathy can often be the pull to act at all that a lot of people need, the truth is:

“The decline of violence may owe something to an expansion of empathy,” the psychologist Steven Pinker has written, “but it also owes much to harder-boiled faculties like prudence, reason, fairness, self-control, norms and taboos, and conceptions of human rights.” A reasoned, even counter-empathetic analysis of moral obligation and likely consequences is a better guide to planning for the future than the gut wrench of empathy.

Monday, August 19, 2013

Sociopaths feel emotion

I have been surprised by how often I hear or read someone saying that sociopaths don't have emotions or can't form emotional bonds with other people. Most often it's people talking about how sociopaths are soulless monsters or must live lives completely devoid of any real meaningful relationships, but sometimes it's someone saying that he couldn't possibly be a sociopath because he feels emotions and love, etc. This is all fallacy. The three main diagnostic criterions actually have relatively little to say about emotions: Cleckley only mentions "general poverty in major affective reactions" and a poorly integrated sex life, Hare's PCL-R also lists shallow affect, and the DSM-V's ASPD only says that sociopaths tend to experience irritability and don't feel remorse. Nowhere does it say that sociopaths don't love. Nowhere does it say that sociopaths can't form emotional bonds. There is not a single historical example of a sociopath who is a completely emotionless, robot loner, so I don't know from where people are getting this image of the emotionless sociopath.

I thought about this popular misconception when I read this recent comment:

"How does a sociopath know when the missing emotions that make him supposedly so different, since he does not feel them, are feigned? In other words how does he learn to differentiate between feigned and real emotions?"

I am sociopathic, but have some emotion. These emotions are egocentric and only arise with events I am directly involved with, but they are still there. I feel joy and happiness at doing my favorite activities and I can (but may not always) feel anger or sadness when things do not go my way. Nonetheless, these are 'feelings' because they provide information that goes beyond the intellectual analysis of the situation at hand.

Because I have those feelings I can easily contrast those with situations where I do not or am faking them. If I am 'acting' in such a way to not betray myself, and my only contribution to that acting is my intellectual state, then I know that there is an absence of feeling there. If one tells me about how their friend died and they are in tears, I know that I must contribute with an appropriate response so that they 1) do not realize my status and 2) are not feeling any worse. Going through the motions because of this intellectual realization is far different than the automatic response given by most non-sociopaths. I think, by and large, we realize that we are not giving the same response as non-sociopaths because we realize that we have to craft the *entire* interaction with another person, not just the words.

But I don't think even this idea of faking emotions is so different than most people. Do you always mean it when you say "oh, I'm so sorry to hear that"?

Of course who knows whether sociopaths are feeling the same emotions that everyone else is, but I don't think anyone's emotional palette is completely identical to anyone else. Rather people's emotions are going to depend on their culture, their belief system, their education, the societal expectations placed on them, along with the vast natural and physical differences between people's brain and brain chemistry. This applies particularly to a complex emotion like love. I was actually just talking to a friend about how the only reason he can tell his wife loves him is that she very actively ensures that he is sexually satisfied (she's not a sociopath, but this "complaint" could very well be said about many sociopathic spouses). But whatever, right? Who is to say that this is a lesser or less desirable love than someone who would love to hold your hand in a hot air balloon?

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Economics and sociopathy

I was talking to an economist friend recently. We were talking about how economics is not just a dismal science, but that economists have a pretty dismal view of human nature, possibly because economists themselves are not generally altruistic or prosocial? He told me that economists are different enough from the general population that economics researchers can't use economics undergraduate students for their experiments because they tend to give very different answers than the average person. Specifically he told me about a game where everyone chooses to either put in a black marble or a white marble in a bag. If you put in a white marble, you increase the overall size of the payout/pie, but you just have one piece of that pie. If you put in a black marble, you get two pieces of the pie, but of a smaller pie. The optimal result would be for everyone to put in white marbles, and a lot of people actually do put in white marbles either because of altruism or optimism or guilt or whatever else. Economists and economics students, however, almost always put in black marbles. My economist friend was using this as evidence that economists are not good people. And if this one scenario was the only thing you knew about economists, perhaps you could say that the results of the experiment are consistent with the economists-as-bad-people hypothesis too.

But I gave him another quick scenario to see how he would handle it: imagine that you are at war, just you and five other fellow soldiers, all standing around in a circle. A grenade gets launched into the middle of the circle. If someone jumps on the grenade, only one person dies. If no one jumps on the grenade, there's a 20% chance someone might die and everyone will suffer moderate to critical injuries. Everyone is equidistant from the grenade and has an equal opportunity to jump on the grenade. Before I tell you what he said, I want the sociopaths who are reading this to think what they would do.






So, I asked my economist friend what he would do and he immediately replied, "I would jump on the grenade." Of course he would. He's rational and cares about efficiency. He would be the type of person in the trolley problem to throw the switch and kill the one to save the five, and apparently that answer doesn't change even when he is the one who needs to die. I think his answer surprised even him, though I'm not sure why. Perhaps because he had convinced himself that economists are soulless or at the very least selfish (i.e., rationally self-interested). But there's nothing remotely selfish or even self-interested about jumping on the grenade.

The reason I knew that this example would "work" on him is that he and I think similarly and it's something that I think I might do too. I like efficiency, and it would be efficient to fall on the grenade. Also I like winning, and it would be "winning" to thwart the enemy. It would be powerful, to smother the force of such a powerful device with just my body. Also I'm impulsive and not particularly attached to life. I actually think that a lot of sociopaths would do the same for one or more of those reasons. In fact, and I wish there was some way to accurately test this, I predict that a higher percentage of sociopaths would jump on the grenade than non-sociopaths, if for nothing else than the indecision or paralyzing fear that a lot of non-sociopaths might experience -- by the time they got around to making the decision, it might be too late. These are just guesses, but I don't think it's crazy to think that sociopaths might be braver and more pro-social in certain situations than normal people, just like economists might be more selfless than the average person in certain situations.

Whether or not my prediction is correct, I think this example also illustrates how dangerous it is to perform a couple experiments in controlled situations and extrapolate the data far beyond those particular situations. Sloppy science writers (and even serious researchers) make this mistake all of the time, e.g. if sociopaths seem to not show empathy in one situation, it's easy to make the (apparently incorrect) presumption that they never feel empathy. The truth is context matters immensely and we only know a sliver of all there is to know about ourselves and others. 

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Song: Lana Del Rey's Serial Killer



Wish I may, wish I might
Find my one true love tonight.
Do you think that he
Could be you?
If I pray really tight,
Get into a fake bar fight,
While I'm walking down
The avenue.
If I lay really quiet,
I know that what I do isn't right,
I can't stop what I
Love to do.
So I murder love in the night,
Watching them fall one by one they fight,
Do you think you'll
Love me too, ooh, ooh?

Baby, I'm a sociopath,
Sweet serial killer.
On the warpath,
'Cause I love you
Just a little too much.
I love you just
A little too much.
(Much, much, much).
You can see me
Drinking cherry cola,
Sweet serial killer.
I left a love note,
Said you know I love,
The thrill of the rush.
You know I love,
The thrill of the rush.
(Rush, rush, rush).
(You send me right to heaven),
Sweet serial killer,
(I guess I'll see him over).
Do it for the thrill of the rush,
Love you just a little too much, much.
(You send me right to heaven),
Sweet serial killer,
(I guess I'll see him over).
I love you just a little too much,
Love you just a little too much, much.

My black fire's burning bright,
Maybe I'll go out tonight.
We can paint the town
In blue.
I'm so hot, I ignite,
Dancing in the dark and I shine.
Like a light I'm
Luring you.
Sneak up on you, really quiet,
Whisper "Am I what your heart desires?"
I could be your
Ingenue.
Keep you safe and inspired,
Baby, let your fantasies unwind.
We can do what you
Want to do, ooh, ooh.

Baby, I'm a sociopath,
Sweet serial killer.
On the warpath,
'Cause I love you
Just a little too much.
I love you just
A little too much.
(Much, much, much).
You can see me
Drinking cherry cola,
Sweet serial killer.
I left a love note,
Said you know I love,
The thrill of the rush.
You know I love,
The thrill of the rush.
(Rush, rush, rush).
(You send me right to heaven),
Sweet serial killer,
(I guess I'll see him over).
Do it for the thrill of the rush,
Love you just a little too much, much.
(You send me right to heaven),
Sweet serial killer,
(I guess I'll see him over).
I love you just a little too much,
Love you just a little too much, much.
(Just have fun), wanna,
Play you like a game boy.
(Don't want one), what's,
The thrill of the same toy?
La la, la la la, la la,
La la lie down, down.
(Just have fun), wanna,
Play you like a game boy.
(Don't want one), what's,
The thrill of the same toy?
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